The Pick Up Page 2

  “Are you learning about the food groups at school?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh,” Caroline said.

  “What else did you learn?”

  “Uhhh . . . I forget.” The universal kid phrase for I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

  They drove in silence for a few minutes, splashing through rain-filled potholes. Kyle didn’t remember it raining quite so much in Red Creek when he was growing up. It was supposed to be one of the benefits to leaving Seattle, having more sunny days for a change, but it had rained pretty well nonstop since they had moved back.

  The Bluetooth clipped to his ear chirped, signaling an incoming call. The plastic was uncomfortable, but it was the best way to manage his clients while he was in the car. His regular set of wheels had been built before hands-free had become a thing, and temporarily syncing his phone to Ben’s SUV had seemed pointless when he had already been stupidly late to pick up Caroline from school. Kyle pointed at Caroline’s reflection in the mirror. She mimicked locking her mouth shut with a key, and he depressed the earpiece. “It’s Kyle.”

  “Oh thank god!” Shannon sounded stressed.

  Kyle put on his crisis-management voice. It was his preferred tone when Shannon called. “Hey, Shannon. Did you get the confirmation about the charity auction? I sent it over last night.”

  “I don’t care about the auction. I’m freaking out right now.”

  Kyle hoped she didn’t hear him sigh. Freaking out was Shannon’s general state of being.

  “Really? What’s the problem?”

  “Madison’s got a birthday party tomorrow, and she didn’t bother to show me the invitation. I found it in her backpack this afternoon. Honestly. The kid thinks I’m a mind reader.”

  “Okay. So you want me to RSVP?” It was important to keep Shannon on task. She had a tendency to spiral into panic.

  “No, I took care of that. I know the girl’s mom from skating club. I told her I’d sent an email RSVP weeks ago, and when she said she hadn’t got it, I pretended like it got lost in a spam filter.”

  Kyle couldn’t help his eye roll. Spam filters: the perfect escape clause. He scrunched up his face at Caroline in the rearview mirror, and she giggled.

  “So what can I do to help?”

  Shannon had been his boss since he’d left college, first at the charity, and then when he’d gone virtual with his business. She’d agreed to keep him on as a virtual assistant when he’d announced he was moving back to the East Coast, and he was grateful for that, but it still baffled him sometimes that she was a grown woman managing a million-dollar charity and a family.

  “A gift, Kyle! I don’t have time to go shopping. The party’s at four o’clock tomorrow. You can work with that, right?”

  Kyle turned onto his father’s street.

  “Sure thing. How old is the birthday girl?”

  “She’s in Madison’s class. Haven’t you been listening?”

  “Okay, so eight, then? I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry.”

  “Thanks,” Shannon said. “Put it on the Amex if you can.”

  “No problem. I’ll email you the confirmation when I get it sorted.”

  “Do you have to work tonight, Daddy?” Caroline asked when he’d finished his call.

  “A little bit,” he said. Caroline crossed her arms over her chest and stuck out her lower lip. “Don’t give me that look. I taught you that look and it has no power over me.”

  They pulled into the driveway. Kyle hopped out and came around to open the SUV’s back door and take Caroline’s bag. Ben would be by to take back the Range Rover later.

  “Daddy?” Caroline asked as Kyle hung his own coat by the front door.

  “Yes, Jelly Bean?”

  “If you’re working tonight, does that mean we can have pizza?”

  Shopping for Shannon only took twenty minutes online. Kyle found a Princess Amazonia gift set, no doubt a new release since the movie had been spun out into a TV show too. It was a too-convenient ploy to separate doting parents from their money. The set was complete with all the dolls and the Princess’s jungle tree hut. Caroline assured him that it was super awesome amazing excellent. He pretended not to see the wistfulness on her face when he showed her the picture of the giant tree fort. A toy like that would earn him at least a month’s worth of Dad Points if he bought it for her, but the total cost was more than Kyle’s income that week, and maybe the week after too. Enough of Shannon’s money spent though, and shipping was guaranteed to arrive, wrapped, to the birthday girl’s house by noon the following day, so at least one little girl would be happy.

  He was pulling a lentil loaf out of the oven when his dad got home from work.

  “Hey, Dad!”

  A month into his return to Red Creek, and Kyle still wasn’t used to how much older his dad had gotten since Kyle had gone away to college. His thinning hair had turned silver where it had once been a soft brown. The strain of the last few years had etched new lines in his face that were visible all the time, and not only when he laughed or frowned. His shirt stretched over a gut that balanced precariously on his belt.

  “That smells amazing,” he said.

  Kyle grinned. “Bet you say that to all the girls. The kale will be ready in five minutes.”

  “Kale?” His father’s expression clouded.

  “You liked it last time, Dad. You’re worse than Caroline sometimes.”

  His dad smiled, the way he always did when Kyle said his daughter’s name. “It amazes me that you know how to make all these things. Did you at least make mashed potatoes?”

  “Yes, Dad. And if you eat it all, you can have two scoops of ice cream instead of one for dessert.”

  “Can I have two scoops of ice cream?” Caroline asked as she wandered into the kitchen.

  “We’ll see.” Kyle meant no, but he knew she’d take it as yes. It was a trap he fell into less lately. “Go wash your hands. We’re going to have dinner.”

  Ten minutes later, the Fenton clan, all three of them, were circled around the small kitchen table.

  “So how was school today?” Kyle’s dad asked Caroline.

  “Good.” Caroline pushed her lentils around her plate. “Daddy was late to pick me up, and Mr. Hathaway was mad.”

  Kyle wondered at his daughter’s ability to always zero in on the details he least wanted to talk about. Hadn’t anything notable happened at recess?

  “Mr. Hathaway was mad?” his father said.

  “Yes. Because he got all wet and Daddy was supposed to call to say he was going to be late, but he didn’t and that made Mr. Hathaway angry, but he said it was unfor . . . unfor . . . What did he say, Daddy?”

  “Unforeseen.”

  “Unforeseen and so it was okay. And then Daddy said Mr. Hathaway was hot.”

  A mouthful of mashed potatoes lodged itself in Kyle’s throat, and he choked.

  “Are you okay?” Caroline asked. He tried to smile, but that seemed to make it harder to breathe somehow. His eyes watered and he flailed, knocking over Caroline’s juice cup as he reached for his own drink. Caroline leaned over to pat him on the back, and Kyle gave a weak smile and wobbly thumbs-up. His dad appeared next to him, with a cloth to wipe up the spilled juice. Caroline kept patting him, her little hands becoming increasingly forceful, although they didn’t cover enough area to really make any difference. Eventually he held up a hand and gulped down big swigs of water from his glass.

  “Sorry. I’m okay, Bean.” He smiled at her and wiped his eyes with a napkin. Her lower lip wobbled, so he pulled her onto his lap and buried his face in her hair. The smell of his daughter, warm bread and a hint of sweetness from her No Tangles shampoo, was one of his favorite things.

  “Well, I think that’s pretty much it for dinner, don’t you?” his father said as he came back to the table. “Caroline, how about we watch a movie tonight?”

  “Princess Amazonia!” Caroline shrieked as she scrambled from Kyle’s lap. “Come on, Grandpa!”

 
He smiled at her. “Why don’t you go get it set up? I’ll be right in.” As he glanced at Kyle, the expression on his face said We Need to Talk. Kyle had seen that pointed glint in his eye so many times over the course of his life, and it almost never boded well for him.

  The two men sat in silence at the table while they listened to Caroline’s little feet thump toward the den.

  “You’re going to rot her brain if you keep suggesting after-dinner TV,” Kyle said when he heard the TV turn on. “Aren’t I supposed to be signing her up for endless cello and tennis lessons?”

  “Kyle.” His dad was apparently unwilling to be distracted by the idea of his only granddaughter as a prodigy. “I’m not sure that telling your daughter you’re attracted to her first-grade teacher is the best way to get settled here.”

  Kyle rolled his eyes and sighed. “I’m not attracted to him, Dad. I was simply stating an empirical fact. It was nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing if she’s bringing it up at dinner.”

  “It was nothing. Although if you’d seen him, you’d know I’m not wrong.” Kyle smiled and waited for his father’s returning smile at the joke. It didn’t happen.

  “That’s not the point. Your daughter has lost her mother, and you don’t want to confuse her about . . .” His father’s brow creased as he searched for words, showing those worried lines Kyle didn’t remember again.

  “Please, Dad, spare me. I’m not going to do anything stupid. My daughter’s ogre of a teacher gave me a lecture for being late, and I wanted to lighten the mood afterwards. I didn’t mean it and Caroline knows that. We play around all the time,” he said. When his father grimaced, Kyle sighed and tried a softer approach. “If it will make you feel better, I’ll tell her I wasn’t serious about it, but trust me. I know my kid. In an hour, any thoughts of hot Mr. Hathaway will be replaced by Princess Amazonia and her jungle friends, and nothing else will matter.”

  On cue, Caroline’s voice called from the other room.

  “Grandpa, it’s starting! You’re going to miss it!”

  “There’s popcorn in the cupboard if you want it.” Kyle stood to collect their plates.

  “It’s not the all-natural crap you bought last week, is it?”

  “Yes, it is. Fake popcorn butter is all chemicals. I don’t want Caroline eating that.”

  His dad rolled his eyes. It was a Fenton trait, passed down through generations.

  “Grandpa!” Caroline called again.

  “What’s with the face?” Rebecca picked up Adam’s plate as she walked by.

  “What face?” he asked.

  “Yours. It’s all grumpy. And you didn’t say three words during dinner.” She turned the sink on to wash the dishes, and Adam went to pull a towel from the rack to help. Upstairs, a herd of elephants thundered down the hall.

  “Peter Thomas Burton! David Christopher Burton!” Rebecca’s voice hit a pitch that made Adam flinch. “You go sit down and get your homework started in the next two minutes, or you won’t believe the chores I will find for you to do!” There was laughter upstairs, the sound of a door slamming. “Shit.” She sighed.

  “Swear jar,” Adam said. Rebecca glared at him from the corner of her eye, but then fished into her pocket and threw a couple of coins into the half-full glass jar on the window sill.

  “Can you go see what they’re doing?” she asked her husband, Cameron, who was sitting at the kitchen table. Cam glanced up from his cell phone, opened his mouth, saw the expression on his wife’s face, and headed toward the whirlwind his sons were making.

  “Never have teenagers, Adam.” Rebecca sighed again as she rattled cups around in soapy water. “Sometimes I think you’ve got the right idea with teaching. You get a new set of babies every year and never have to deal with teenage sass. All the sighing and mumbling anytime I try to talk to them. It would be so much easier if they were little again.”

  “Says you,” Adam said. Rebecca’s memory on the issue was clearly selective. Six-year-old sass could be very effective, regardless of how she remembered it with her own kids.

  “I miss my sweet boys who wanted to sit on my lap and cuddle. I’d go so far as to say I miss the time I found Dave coloring on the upstairs wall with permanent marker. That was easy to fix. The destructive force of teenagers could bring a small country to its knees in a week.”

  “At least they’re clean.” Adam picked up a glass to dry it. “I caught one of my students wiping his nose with the back of his hand and then rubbing it on another kid’s sleeve at recess yesterday.”

  “Clean’s relative, little brother. The dishes I found under Pete’s bed last week were so moldy they were on the verge of developing language skills and religion.” She shuddered. “And there’s no remorse. When they were small and I gave them a hard time, they were so apologetic, they’d follow me around the house and hug me anytime I stopped moving. These days, it’s a miracle if I can get them to look up from whatever damn screen they have going while I talk to them.”

  Adam knew that feeling well. At six years old, half his students were too plugged in already. Every one of them knew how to use a cell phone. He wasn’t sure his family had owned a computer when he had been his students’ age.

  He and Rebecca stood side by side in companionable silence for a minute. Their dishwashing routine went back years, and the familiarity of it now was comforting.

  Of course, Rebecca decided that comfort should only last so long.

  “You didn’t answer my question from before,” she said.

  “What question was that?” He’d hoped she might have forgotten. Rebecca shook a soapy hand at him.

  “Don’t avoid the subject! You’ve been distracted since you got here. Everything okay at work?”

  “Yes. No.” He may have growled the last word. “I don’t know. I met a new parent today.”

  “Are they still trying to woo you with pastry?” Rebecca’s nose wrinkled. “Adam, I wish you’d let me drop a few hints with—”

  “No!” he said, and she jumped, rattling dishes. “Sorry. No, you don’t need to do that. It’s not . . .” He licked his lips to buy time. “It’s not a mother, it was . . . He was my newest student’s father.”

  “Father?” Rebecca’s eyes sparkled with mischief that only big sisters can imagine. “As in a man? A hot man?”

  “A young man. I think. I don’t know. He looked young, too young to have a six-year-old. Definitely too young to . . .”

  After he’d watched the Range Rover pull away from the school, he’d gone straight into the office and asked to see Caroline Fenton’s file. It had been very thin, with only her enrollment form and vaccination records. He’d read it all anyway. Her last school was Oak Park Public School in Seattle. No known allergies or medical conditions. Under parental information, her father’s name was listed as Kyle Fenton. His marital status said widowed. Caroline’s mother’s name was Olivia Russo. Under Olivia’s marital status, someone had circled Other and then written in deceased. There was a secondary contact listed for emergencies—Gord Fenton: Caroline’s grandfather.

  “To what?” Rebecca said.

  There were so many ways to answer that question. Too young to have lost his wife? Too young to be managing on his own? Too young to show the easy aptitude for parenting the man in skinny jeans had shown when he’d swaggered up to the school? Had he swaggered? Adam’s mind was wandering.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Too nothing. I don’t see a lot of dads at work. It stood out. That’s all.”

  The arch of Rebecca’s eyebrow told him she wasn’t buying it.

  “You know . . .” she said, keeping her hands busy with a grimy lasagna pan, “if there was a hot dad—”

  “I can’t date a parent.”

  “Says you. But it’s practically May, so he won’t be a parent for long and—”

  “The answer’s still no. Anyway, that’s not what I was thinking about when I brought up Caroline and her dad.” Despite the memories of Kyle’s long fingers and
easy smile that had kept intruding over dinner, he really had spent most of the time wondering about their story.

  “Caroline?” Rebecca straightened. “As in Caroline Fenton? Gord Fenton’s granddaughter?”

  Shit.

  Adam’s jaw tightened, and his ears were on fire. He hated small towns sometimes.

  “Are you blushing? You’re blushing!” Rebecca’s tone was teasing, but she removed the plate that he had in a death grip from his hands before he snapped it in two.

  “How do you know about Caroline?”

  “Holy shit, it is Gord’s grandkid!”

  “Swear jar.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him. “I heard him talking. Gord. He comes into the café all the time. Sweet guy. He works at the hospital. He has the best stories about the things that happen there.” She paused, like she was waiting for a response. The hospital was down the street from the café, but Adam didn’t see what that had to do with what they were discussing. “Anyway, he came in a couple months ago, all excited, talking about how his son and his granddaughter were coming to live with him. He had her picture on his phone, showed it to anyone who would stop long enough to see it. Cute kid.”

  “Did he talk about his son?” Adam asked. “Or maybe his son’s wife?”

  “Not really, I don’t think so. Oh! He might have said the mother wasn’t in the picture anymore, that his son and the kid were coming to start over? Why?”

  “Nothing.” Adam shook his head. “Caroline said her mother was in heaven.”

  “Poor thing. Six years old and she’s lost her mother.” Rebecca’s expression grew sad. “How long ago did it happen? How did her father seem to be holding up?”

  Adam shrugged. They were gossiping like old ladies now, which he hated doing, especially when it came to his students and their parents. At least he’d managed to distract Rebecca from his love life, or lack thereof.

  “I couldn’t tell. He was late, picked up his daughter, apologized, and they were gone again.”

  “We should have them over for dinner.” Rebecca put the last pot in the dish rack.

  “What? Why?” Adam asked.